“If a patient’s unconscious mind has turned against her, the patient must turn it right back around,” Dr. Bek tells me.
This doctor asked permission to apply the treatments he learned in Germany. He said doctors had been studying psychosomatic medicine since the Middle Ages and even though the contemporary medical community was skeptical, he for one took comfort in practices that had lasted so long. He started coming to check her vitals, her coordination and reflexes; at first the results were dire and unchanging, but he insisted that wasn’t important: what was important was his wife believing she was being treated, that there was the possibility of a cure. He massaged her hands and feet daily. Her room was divided by a thin curtain. On the other side, a man was dying of Alzheimer’s. She was moved to a room where, on the other side of the curtain, a man, one of the few patients who would ever leave this hospital, was nearly recovered from a bout of cholera. A private nurse was assigned to his wife, a pretty young woman in a white uniform who sat with her and told her how healthy she was starting to look, how she would soon be well. With a warm washcloth, the nurse kept her skin moist and clean. She trimmed her fingernails and brushed her hair. In the wheelchair, she took her for long outings all around the hospital.
In the winter, Dr. Bek expected to bury his wife, but the snow began to fall in Oslo and she was still alive. The treatments continued. The senior doctor was pleased. She began saying one or two words daily. Her sagging eye peeped open. One afternoon, when Dr. Bek stopped the wheelchair in front of a window, she raised a hand toward a distant ship and said, “Sail.” Her arm trembled, but her voice was clear.
During his visits, the senior doctor would tell her that she was winning the fight against her unconscious mind, against the enemy within, the one that had been trying so hard to kill her, and she would lower her bottom lip into an uneven smile.
After two years, she slipped into a coma and died. It was far more time than anyone had a right to expect. A miracle, everyone in the hospital declared, even though Dr. Bek knew it was no miracle at all. It was the work of this doctor and the way he had convinced her mind to help her body.
“In Oslo, I learned that, in the fight against illness, the mind is the most powerful weapon at our disposal.”
He tells me the Hospital patients were chosen not only because of our immunity, but because we had all endured trauma; we should have died a dozen times over and here we sit. We should be desperate to forget and yet our unconscious minds want us to remember, to stay alive. On behalf of the Hospital, private investigators studied our records—DCS reports, medical histories, court filings, credit ratings—in order to select the right sample, though Dr. Bek had the final say on who would come.
“Take you, for example.” Behind the face shield his eyelids, laced with blue veins, flutter. “Abandoned on the steps of a hospital. In winter, no less. Raised in all those strange places, with all those strange people. Drugging yourself unconscious every chance you got.”
Did he know our trauma would keep us from forming a cohesive rebellion? Keep us from doing more than standing around like dazed cattle? That we could be volatile, maybe even dangerous, but in the end have little faith in our ability to make anything better.
You aren’t the first person to do experiments on me, I want to tell him, but maybe he already knows.
Dr. Bek stops. He releases a long breath and it sounds like something is being deflated.
“If I say you are a patient, you are a patient. If I say I am a doctor who will cure you, I am a doctor who will cure you. If I say there is a pathologist examining your blood, there is a pathologist examining your blood. At the hospital, this has been our philosophy, our way of reaching the unconscious mind.”
I’m still sitting in the Venn chair, my feet planted on the floor, swimming with information. I realize two things:
First, Dr. Bek hasn’t just been talking about Oslo. He has been talking about this Hospital too. They do not have a cure here and they are not in the process of creating one. Rather they are hoping that with the right encouragement, the right kind of help, we will be able to cure ourselves.
Second, I do the math. Dr. Bek’s wife was still a young woman when she got sick, not so much older than me, and I understand that he is telling me this story about the kind of person, the kind of doctor, he has chosen to be, because he never got a chance to tell it to her.
*
That night, I dream of Jan Mayen. I’m standing on a tiny island in the middle of the sea, in sand the color of bone. There are people moving through this bone-colored sand with plastic bags over their heads and I think that one of them is Marcus. I try to find him by looking at everyone’s palms, picking up one soft, warm hand after another and reading the lines, but they all look the same; I will never find him. In the distance, a volcano rumbles.
When I wake up, I’m not in my bed, but in our closet, hidden behind the legs of Louis’s scrubs, panting in the dark.
*
Apart from my mother, there is only one other person I’ve searched for on the Death List. I checked for Marcus during my first week in the Hospital and could not find him on either list, not the one for the living or the one for the dead.
*
On my third meeting with Dr. Bek, there is no more talk of Oslo. The room feels colder. In the Venn chair, my skin hardens under my scrubs and I start shivering like I’m outside in the snow. This time, Dr. Bek doesn’t start with a story, but by sliding a manila folder across his desk, toward me.